


The Betaverse

by Eileen_R



Category: The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: A/B/O Omegaverse, F/M, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:21:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27098785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eileen_R/pseuds/Eileen_R
Summary: Tony didn’t want to become a supervillain.  He didn’t.  He never had.But the line was so thin.And oh, my lord.  The laundry.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker/Wade Wilson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 58





	The Betaverse

Pepper was so pretty, laid out pink and damp against the 200 count Egyptian cotton sheets, utterly relaxed from their first round. Tony took the opportunity to touch and taste and feel. One soft breast felt heavenly in his hand. The other tasted just as good. Salt and perfume and Pepper…

“Hmm,” Pepper hummed, fingernails gently scratching his scalp. “That’s nice.”

“The best way to work out stress, I tell you.” He switched his mouth to nuzzle her left breast, used his free hand to trail down the curves of her stomach to the damp curls surrounding her clit, petting her slowly. Tortuously. “It’s gotten me through many a dull meeting—” He lost his hold on her as Pepper started to giggle. “In my imagination. Quit that!”

“Oh, Tony. Never change,” Pepper sighed and bent over to kiss him, lightly, several times in a row. Tony hummed back in appreciation.

“So what’s getting you through those meetings?”

“Sheer force of will and a continuously invalidated belief that humans are incapable of surpassing the previous limits of their own innate insanity.” Tony snickered. “Oh! Speaking of, guess what Darcy found while she was sifting through Avengers fanfic this week.”

“I wouldn’t even try. Seriously, you’re making Darcy read fanfic, now?”

“It’s part of her job as Social Media Manager,” Pepper said piously. “Besides, her reports are hilarious. This week, she found a story set in a universe where no one had secondary designations. Just male and female, and intersex, I guess, but no Alphas, no Omegas. At all.”

“What?” Tony lay back, trying to wrap his mind around it. It did not compute. “You mean, everyone was Beta?”

“Exactly!”

“But how would that work? How would you even build a story around that? Everyone would go home from their job as an insurance adjuster or accountant, eat a healthy balanced meal, have sex in missionary position, sleep for eight hours, get up and do it again. Betas are boring!”

“Tony! You’re a Beta, and you’re the least boring person I know!”

“Still,” Tony said, unanswerably. He combed absently through Pepper’s curls. “What about the rest of the stats?”

“Same,” Pepper yawned, fingernails tracing his ribs. “You are still the number one shipped Avenger.”

“I am simultaneously proud and ashamed.”

“As you should be. Um, about thirty percent of fanfic has you as a secret Alpha, topping all the Avengers in turn, while about thirty-five has you a secret Omega, bottoming for all the Avengers at the same time.”

Tony sputtered, half in outrage, half in laughter. “My designation report was literally on the cover of Times. What the hell—”

“You were such a cute fourteen-year old,” Pepper hummed. Her fingernails trailed lower. Lower. “Even cuter now. Ready for round two?”

“I could be—” he kissed her. Once. Twice. “—persuaded…”

*

The next morning, Tony pushed the elevator button for the trip up to the communal floor. He owed Pepper a full day in the workshop to catch up on projects, but the communal floor had the best coffee, no holds barred. He stepped inside the elevator and slip-jerked before he caught his balance. What--?

Oh. There was a puddle of slick on the floor. Great.

“Jarvis? Call in a cleaning bot for the elevator, please.”

And, of course, there was a splodge of some kind of white bodily fluid deposit on one wall. Two walls. And the floor. 

“Jarvis, make it two cleaning bots, and a sanitizer.”

The elevator door opened onto the communal floor and the sight of two super-soldiers, cursing loudly as they fought. Wait, they were naked. Also, not fighting. Nope, not even close to fighting—

“Jarvis, workshop, please.”

And workshop coffee it was.

“And send some more cleaning bots to the communal floor in a bit, hmm?”

Bruce was inside the workshop, tinkering with a DNA synthesizer circuit board Tony vaguely remembered Bruce pulling out yesterday. “Hey, Brucie-bear. You been here all night?”

Bruce shrugged. “I’m Beta. It’s what we do.”

Tony chuckled at the old saw. But it niggled at him this morning, somehow. “How many hours do you work, Bruce? In a week.”

Bruce looked at him a little strangely. He shrugged. “About forty, fifty hours in the lab—”

“Actually, it averages out to approximately fifty-four hours a week, in both your lab and Sir’s workshop,” Jarvis interjected.

“Ok. Plus I teach a yoga class, at SI’s Wellness Center, and I back-up Medical for staff who are out because of heats or ruts. You know, the usual.”

“So well over sixty hours a week. What about Nat, do you know?” he asked about the other Beta on the Avengers team.

“Uh. Well. She trains, of course, and goes on missions, and backs-up at SHIELD as needed. I wouldn’t know how to estimate—”

“Jarvis?” Tony asked.

“Counting missions as a twenty-four/seven workload, Ms. Romanoff has averaged seventy-three hours a week over the past eight months.”

The niggle in the back of Tony’s mind was starting to coalesce, but possibly the Avengers were outliers. “Jarvis? Pull up the Department of Labor website, please?”

“What about you?” Bruce said, a little line between his brows. 

“Me? An hour a day for food and hygiene, five to six hours for sleep. Everything else is work.” He shrugged, working his way through sub-menus on the government website. 

“Tony. That’s a lot of hours. Wait, what about sex?”

“Taken out of sleep. Now, here we go. Forty-two point three hours per week labor, average of every employed adult in the United States. But If you separate it out by designations—”

“The government—The government doesn’t report statistics using designations.”

“Well, not publicly. But the information is there, if you know how to get to it,” Tony started delving through internal code. “Hm. That’s… interesting. Nationwide, it looks like about fifty-two hours a week for Betas, thirty-five for Alphas, eighteen for omegas.”

“Omegas do a lot of the child-care, which isn’t counted as paid employment,” Bruce pointed out, the crease between his brows growing.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” It was just, the economic impact was a bit staggering, once you saw it in black and white. “Never mind. It’s not important.” Tony shook his head and left the subject go. 

Or he would have, if he hadn’t been going over the Tower’s budget with the building manager later that day. Yollie Ramirez was detail oriented, a perfectionist, a bit OCD. It made her the perfect fit for her job, even if Tony did have to spend longer than he liked going through arcane details. For example—

“—and the laundry bill has gone up. Again,” Yollie scowled. 

“Eh, Peter has been spending more time in the tower. With Wade.”

“Parker’s an Omega? Oh, yeah, that would account for it,” Yollie marked off that line-item with a check mark. “At least we’ve got recycling set up and the power to pay for it. Did you know, half of all third-world countries have to import fresh water just for laundry? India’s on water rationing. Bolivia and Paraguay are going on rationing next month. ‘Course, India’s a shithole for Omegas anyway. Hell, all of them are. Ok, I think that does it. Thanks, Tony.”

“Yeah, thanks, Yollie. See you next month,” Tony echoed. He shook his head hard. He wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t.

And he didn’t.

So it was a surprise when, the next day, during an impromptu lunch meeting with his favorite visiting medical researcher, Dr. Cho, his mouth opened and asked, apropos of absolutely nothing, “So how hard would it be to genetically engineer some changes into the A/B/O codes?”

“Oh, easy-peasy,” Cho said, taking a delicate bite of her salmon. “Hm. This is good.”

“Really?” 

“Oh, yeah. The DNA codes for A/B/O were worked out a couple of years ago. Published in Gene Science Monthly, I think? It’s on the web by now. All anyone who need to do is choose a retrovirus and install CRISPR to program whatever changes you wanted.” She hummed around her hollandaise asparagus. 

“And that’s it?” Tony wasn’t an expert on the squishy sciences. It seemed that there had been some advances while he was busy upgrading suits. “Anyone with a grudge and two test tubes can wipe out secondary designations around the world?”

“Oh, not, not at all. That would require a delivery system capable of reaching and infecting each and every one of the 7.8 billion people world-wide. Can’t be done.”

Unless one had access to a wide variety and, literally, limitless number of nano-bots, of course…

Tony forced himself to smile. “Right. Just as well, eh? What looks good for dessert?”

He did not think about how to design a fleet of nano-bots attached to the relevant retrovirus that could be dispersed through the air and cover every populated landmass world-wide. 

He didn’t.

Back in the tower that afternoon, he shared the elevator down to the workshop with a maid and three laundry carts full of used linens. Tony couldn’t quite suppress a grimace. They reeked. 

“Sorry, sir,” the maid offered. “Barton—” She shrugged.

Ah. Phil was in heat. Again.

And Barton was off the roster. Again.

“No problem,” Tony sighed. 

The Avengers hadn’t had a full line-up ready for battle since—since the Chitauri. It was fine, they made do. Or, well, it had been fine so far. Until the next time a portal opened in the sky and alien warlords came calling…

Screwing around with your own species genome as a fix-it, that was all out supervillain territory. 

Tony didn’t want to become a supervillain. He didn’t. He never had. 

But the line was so thin.

And oh, my lord. The laundry.


End file.
